Improve Ansible Performance - performance

Question

I'm attempting to improve the performance for ansible playbooks. I have a test playbook as follows:
---
- name: Test
hosts: localhost
connection: local
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- name: Creating an empty file
file:
path: /tmp/hello
state: touch
- name: Test
command: "echo 'Hello, World!' >> /tmp/hello"
with_sequence: start=1 end=500
delegate_to: localhost
Running this takes a whopping 57 seconds. Comparing to a bash script doing the same thing:
test.sh
#!/bin/bash
touch /tmp/hello
for i in {1..500}
do
sh /home/admin/hello.sh
echo "This is iteration $i"
done
hello.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo "Hello, World!" >> /tmp/hello
That takes ~1.5 seconds to run.
I have already made some changes to ansible.cfg file
[ssh_connection]
ssh_args = -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=18000s -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey
control_path = %(directory)s/ansible-ssh-%%h-%%p-%%r
pipelining = True
Is there anything else I can do to improve this abysmal performance?

Answer 1

With your code, ansible will connect 500 times to the host to run a command. You could create your desired file first, and then upload it to the host.
playbook.yml
---
- name: Test
hosts: localhost
connection: local
gather_facts: false
tasks:
- name: create 'hello' file
ansible.builtin.template:
src: "../templates/hello.j2"
dest: "/tmp/hello"
hello.j2
{% for i in range(500) %}
Hello, World!
{% endfor %}